This is a fashion forum and you are an artistically minded bunch so you must all be gallery goers of some sort or the other. I am interested in seeing the various tastes people have in art and I want to find out about artists I may not have heard off. Painters, sculptors, performance artists, anything. Come on people post away!

I am going to start with Philip Guston who had an exhibition at the Royal Academy a couple of years back. He was an extraordinary painter and had an extraordinarily sad early life

The artist, who spent much of his career painting in New York, encourages us to look unselfconsciously into our inner worlds through his own compellingly complex realm. Guston is indisputably original. However, in terms of politics, values and style he was very much a product of his time.

His work defies pigeonholes and is created by an artist whose politics demanded he fought for humanity and whose personal alienation called on him to withdraw from it.

Childhood brought two overwhelming tragedies to the young Philip Goldstein as he was then known. As an eleven-year-old he reportedly found the body of his father who had hung himself, while at seventeen his older brother died from gangrene that started in his leg after a car accident.

These traumas are imprinted in the recurrent motifs of ropes, limbs and amputated feet.

Guston was assertively left wing. "He was a man of very strong convictions," says his daughter and biographer Musa Mayer. "He was political but not in the sense of joining political parties. He had witnessed some of the most horrific events of the twentieth century."

"He was disturbed by racism, violence and totalitarianism and deeply felt the injustice of them. Of course, he was also a Jew and was profoundly effected by the holocaust – to which he lost family members."

I am sure you must all have heard of the cross dressing potter Grayson Perry. For once the Turner Prize panel got it right. His pottery is sublime.

Everyone has some intellectual or emotional baggage about pottery and Grayson Perry depends on people bringing it with them when they view his work. He is hoping that they might be comforted and seduced by the classic shapes and rich textures.

Perry delivers uncomfortable subjects by stealth. His retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum , Amsterdam and the Barbican Centre in London is called 'Guerrilla Tactics' and included vases which dealt with the construction of gender, the fallout from childhood, war, crime, consumerism, fashion and the art world all delivered under a smokescreen of sumptuous lustre.

One of the great painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John Singer Sargent made his fortune and reputation as a portrait painter of beautiful women and influential men. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, novelists Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, actress Ellen Terry and art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner all sat for him.

Raised in Europe by an American expatriate family, Sargent attended art schools in Paris. Precociously gifted, he soon assimilated lessons from the old masters, the contemporary Impressionists and the Spanish painters Velázquez and Goya, producing a spectacular array of exciting and masterful paintings while only in his 20s. At the 1884 Paris Salon, however, his portrait of the 23-year-old American Virginie Gautreau, shown with bare shoulders, overflowing bosom and haughty manner, scandalized the Paris establishment. The picture, which became known as Madame X, crippled Sargent's hopes of establishing himself as a portrait painter in Paris. In 1886 he moved to London, and in just a few years became the most admired and sought-after portrait painter in Britain and the United States.

Austrian expressionist artist Egon Leo Adolf Schiele, b. June 12, 1890, d. Oct. 31, 1918, was at odds with art critics and society for most of his brief life. Even more than Gustav Klimt, Schiele made eroticism one of his major themes and was briefly imprisoned for obscenity in 1912. His treatment of the nude figure suggests a lonely, tormented spirit haunted rather than fulfilled by sexuality. At first strongly influenced by Klimt, whom he met in 1907, Schiele soon achieved an independent anticlassical style wherein his jagged lines arose more from psychological and spiritual feeling than from aesthetic considerations. He painted a number of outstanding portraits, such as that of his father-in-law, Johann Harms (1916; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), and a series of unflinching and disquieting self-portraits. Late works such as The Family (1918; Oesterreichische Galerie, Vienna) reveal a newfound sense of security.
(ibiblio.org)

__________________design is the contrast of the core of limitations therefore there are no boundaries. it is simply an interpretation of creativity. - jenaiha woods

Degas, (Hilaire-Germain-) Edgar (b. July 19, 1834, Paris, Fr.--d. Sept. 27, 1917, Paris)
French artist, acknowledged as the master of drawing the human figure in motion. Degas worked in many mediums, preferring pastel to all others. He is perhaps best known for his paintings, drawings, and bronzes of ballerinas and of race horses.
The art of Degas reflects a concern for the psychology of movement and expression and the harmony of line and continuity of contour. These characteristics set Degas apart from the other impressionist painters although he took part in all but one of the 8 impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. Degas was the son of a wealthy banker, and his aristocratic family background instilled into his early art a haughty yet sensitive quality of detachment. As he grew up, his idol was the painter Jean Auguste Ingres, whose example pointed him in the direction of a classical draftsmanship, stressing balance and clarity of outline.

sienna, i welcome any thread about art but the thing is, we already have a thread on favourite painters, one on favourite sculptors not to mention one on favourite photographers. i'd like to encourage you to start threads on single artists as well since we have a whole sub-forum dedicated to the matter.

matthew 6:28-29
28"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.